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Some researchers from French government-funded research organizations announced the new Open-Source license, known as CeCILL (English pdf here), which is intended to be compatible with the GPL. CeCILL is intended to make free software more compatible with French law in two areas where it differs significantly from U.S. law: copyright and product liability.

From Slashdot (abridged): &quot;Chris Shiflett at oreillynet.com summarizes a discussion about scalability. Chris argues that PHP scales well, because it fits into the Web's fundamental architecture. 'I think PHP scales well because Apache scales well because the Web scales well. PHP doesn't try to reinvent the wheel; it simply tries to fit into the existing paradigm.'

From Mozilla website:
The Mozilla Foundation today announced the immediate availability of a new preview release of its next generation web browser, Mozilla Firefox 0.9. Mozilla applications run on a wide range of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and are translated into dozens of languages.

A controversial paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems.

Sun Microsystems has discontinued development of two planned chips as it retrenches in a difficult era for the company. Sun has stopped work on the UltraSparc V, a server chip that was supposed to come out late next year, and Gemini, a dual-core chip for Web servers. &quot;In order to get back to profitability, we have to make some difficult choices,&quot; a company spokeswoman said.

A press release announced the formation of the X.Org Foundation and the release of X11R6.7 of the X Window System. The XOrg Foundation is the successor to the X Consortium, formed by many of the most notworthy participants in the XFree86 Project. This code release is a tree forked from the last XFree86 release but without the the lichece changes done by XFree86 group.

From Gimp site: &quot;The GIMP developers are proud to release version 2.0 of the GIMP, the leading free software tool for image manipulation. This release is a major event, and it is the first stable release that is officially supported not only on Unix-based operating systems, but also on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh OS X.&quot;

Brian Vincent just published a short summary of the last Wine conference, detailing all emulator news. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix, this means it is a way to support running Windows programs on Linux and other OSs boxes.

The first Open Source Awards 2004 have been announced. To our view some ar of relevance for astronomical software: Valgrind, a sophisticated debugger for x86-based Linux systems and Pango,a framework for the layout and rendering of internationalized text.

According to Netcraft, in 2003 the Apache HTTP Server went from from 53% to 64% of server share, while all other competitors remained more or less stable in the number of server powered. The graph are well explicative.

A comprehensive and enlightening article on the search of
best optimization in compiling C program have been published here.
It is well known how difficult is to determine the best set of optimization flags
for a given program: the article gives directions and a
program which explores the 2^53 possibilities by means of genetic algorithm.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) is pleased to announce the availability of version 7.4 of the PostgreSQL Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS). This major release is the work of our world wide network of hundreds of developers and contributors over the last nine months. It provides commercial-grade enterprise database functionality and performance with the flexibility and low total cost of ownership widely associated with Open Source software.